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‘Saturn Return’ Review: Spain’s Oscar Submission Is a Chaotically Honest and Formally Audacious Music Biopic
The effectively frantic drama chronicles the turbulent story of ’90s cult band Los Planetas, as they find themselves on the brink of self-destruction or a rebirth.
The astounding feat of directors Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez ’s “ Saturn Return ” is how it cinematically evokes that intertwined creative and personal turmoil with frantic visual energy and formal audaciousness, refusing to capitulate to any subgenre conventions. From that intoxicating artistic spirit emerges one of the most honest and reinvigorating music biopics in years, a work unconcerned with sanitizing the image of its deeply flawed subjects as it entangles viewers in their self-destructive, poetic and ultimately redemptive battle against their worst impulses. Built from an assortment of loosely connected, vivid vignettes, nightmares and rehearsals (or from “500 pieces” as one of the group’s songs says), “Saturn” is a portrait of a musical act, or more precisely of a three-way friendship, undergoing a death by a thousand cuts as they face an uphill battle to repeat their prior success.
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